Dotski here. If you’ve found this blog, you’re probably a regular on politics.ie. I’ve been known to post there a bit, particularly following Irish opinion polls, when I crunch the figures through my trusty spreadsheet. While I’ll keep posting there, it occurred to me during the recent (2010) UK General Election that a dedicated site for discussion of polls (as opposed to slagging off each other’s parties), along the lines of the excellent UK Polling Report, would be a good thing. So rather than wait for someone else to do it, I thought I would myself.

This is day one, so I’ll not be getting much on it just yet, but in addition to analysis of polls as they come out, I’ll also be hoping to upload a couple of resources, including an archive of polls (RedC have their old polls easy to hand, but MRBI etc don’t appear to), and a few spreadsheets that let people experiment a bit.

I’ll also be interested in any ‘private polls’ that people get their hands on, so if any readers get their hands on these, please let me know, and we can consider the implications they’d have in that constituency if true, and what sort of national figures they would be consistent with. While many of these are notoriously unreliable, so is 99% of the internet, and unlike most of that they can be quite fun! And genuine ones, in fairness, often are interesting in that they can indicate what parties are likely to do in terms of candidate strategy, particularly when national polls are indicating figures very different to any previous General Election (I write this in August 2010).

So what are the rules for anyone wishing to post? Well, no political point scoring. Politics.ie is a perfectly good enough a place for that. The idea of this space is proper analysis of polls. Also, play the ball, not the poster. If you think someone has made a crazy extrapolation, say why, don’t say it’s because they are clinically insane (even if you know it’s true. Actually, especially then).

I’ve no idea yet if this will be read by many, but I would hope that, particularly as we approach the next election, this will be a useful place for people trying to work out what will happen in what promises to be the most interesting – and unpredictable – Irish election since the 1940s.

So, in summary, I hope you enjoy the posts, please let us know anything you think your fellow-readers would find interesting, and spread the word!